For much of American history, Protestant Christianity occupied a central, even coercive, place within the nation's cultural politics. Churches considered themselves custodians of national values. Protestants were entrenched as the leaders within American society. Other, non-Protestant groups had to contend with the power structure by cooperating with it, critiquing it, or something in between.

However, Protestant power diminished over the course of the twentieth century. In the 1940s, the US Supreme Court began to apply religion clauses of the First Amendment to the states. In the process, the Court began to undo the many strands of entanglement between religious notions and governance. Obscenity laws, blasphemy laws, religious tests for office on the state level—the entire panoply of religious regulation through law—came under scrutiny. By the 1960s, definitive control over American society slipped from Protestants’ grasp. No-fault divorce, sexual emancipation, and the normative embrace of heterogeneity and pluralism all flourished in a newly liberal society. This cultural transformation only intensified over the next several decades. Now, in the twenty-first century, the United States has been changed from a nation in which Christian privilege could be simply assumed into one in which privilege must be asserted if one hopes to retain it.

These developments raise important historical questions. What caused the decline of Protestant Christian power? And, more importantly, what does that decline tell us about the past and the future place of religion in American political culture?

Naturally enough, a large body of work has attempted to answer those questions. But there is a fundamental disagreement within the historiography about the precise mechanisms of the transformation and what it signifies. In some accounts, the decline of Protestant power seems to be the logical extension of an intellectual process, a gradual stripping away of belief under the corrosive pressure of scientific advance and of the changing structures of American society. These stories usually have an air of inevitability, a presumption that the loss of religious power is part and parcel of an advancing modernity. In other accounts, contingency is presumed and Protestant or religious liberals are blamed for a lack of intellectual rigor, or for lack of a fighting spirit, or simply for being Protestant (this is the Catholic argument), all of which allowed for a creeping secularization that might have been reversed. These narratives usually have an air of lament at the marginalization or repudiation of a religious tradition that their authors admire.Footnote ¹

Still others try something in between, acknowledging the intellectual and structural changes within American society but trying to understand the process as a contingent set of choices that were long in the making. William R. Hutchison, for example, in his 2003 book Religious Pluralism in America, has suggested that although an extreme religious diversity existed in the United States since its founding moment, the normative embrace of that diversity only occurred in the last half of the twentieth century. In explaining the gap between the reality of diversity and its normative embrace, Hutchison suggests that it took time, mentally, for Americans to come to terms with the facts on the ground. As they did so, new cultural definitions came into play.Footnote ²

The mental and cultural process was slow but steady. “The meaning of such widely accepted concepts as religious freedom and mutual respect,” Hutchison writes, “broadened down from one era to the next.” For much of the nineteenth century, Hutchison argues, pluralism was limited to legal and social toleration of minority groups and the absence of overt persecution. In practice, a Protestant establishment ruled over American society. But by the end of the nineteenth century, both the Protestant establishment and those outside the centers of power began to see toleration as an inadequate form of pluralism. Pluralism became defined, instead, as the inclusion of other, non-Protestant groups within the wider cultural conversation on a limited basis. Mainline Protestants still set the terms of the cultural debate, but participants in that cultural conversation now included Catholics, reformed Jews, and a few from the religious fringe. Some still saw this limited inclusion as inadequate—most notably cultural critics and theorists such as Horace Kallen, Randolph Bourne, and Franz Boas. But what Hutchison calls “pluralism as participation,” which involved the decentering of Protestant or Christian values and the loss of establishment Protestant power, did not occur until the 1960s.Footnote ³

Yet the actual causal mechanism, in Hutchison's account, remains foggy. He describes the process in his introduction as a “coming to terms, however grudgingly or opportunistically, with a radical diversification that came crashing in upon the young nation almost at the moment of its birth.” The United States, in this formulation, seems to have a collective mind or psyche that processes an event much like a person comes to terms with death or catastrophe. At other times, Hutchison depicts a shift toward progressivism within American Protestantism, as its leaders noted the increased diversity of the American city and changed their message in order to appeal to the Catholic, Jewish, or disaffected urban masses. At still other times, he references a sustained critique by outsiders who mounted “assaults” on the bastion of Protestant power. When talking about the 1960s, he speaks of the emergence of a pluralist ideology composed of different strands that “converge” to effect cultural change. But the most telling formulation is his description of the present. “Americans today,” he writes, “are being dragged—sometimes kicking and screaming, sometimes in a state of calm and genuine persuasion—into the realities not just of today, but of the early nineteenth century.” The use of the passive voice suggests the wider problem: Hutchison never settles on who precisely is doing the dragging.Footnote ⁴

Christian R. Smith, by contrast, has identified a clearer but far more limited group of secularizing activists who brought about what he calls a “secular revolution.” In making this argument, he claims that the loss of Christian authority in American public life was not “a natural evolutionary progression” of the kind that Hutchison has suggested but rather “a contested revolutionary struggle” in which intellectual elites mounted an extended campaign against Protestant power. These intellectuals banded together as “networks of activists who were largely skeptical, freethinking, agnostic, atheist, or theologically liberal; who were well educated and socially located mainly in knowledge-production occupations; and who generally espoused materialism, naturalism, positivism, and the privatization or extinction of religion.” They moved first through the institutions of American educational and scientific life—the schools, the university, and the media. From there they overthrew “the established regime in most quarters” and assumed power themselves. In the process, the intellectual insurgents “effected a profound cultural revolution which transformed cultural codes and structures of thought, expectations, and practice.”Footnote ⁵

The clarity and sophistication of Smith's argument are admirable, but his account also has its limits. Whereas Hutchison was sensitive to the profound level of religious diversity in the United States and the multitude of historical actors, many of them religious minorities who objected to Protestant power in a variety of arenas, Smith focuses almost entirely on secularist intellectuals. Religious minorities occupy almost no space in his account, and increasing religious diversification receives scant attention. As a result, he looks to a narrow range of arenas in explaining social change. His focus on educational and cultural affairs leaves politics out entirely and is far too neglectful of law. The neglect of politics and law also means he misdiagnoses the timetable. Hutchison argues convincingly that, in spite of the gradual way in which the pluralistic ideal expanded, the process reached its apotheosis in the cultural revolutions of the 1960s. Smith, by contrast, argues that the transformation of the universities in the 1890s spread so effectively into the wider public culture that by the 1920s or certainly the 1930s the Protestant establishment was “in shambles.” His neglect of politics makes him omit Prohibition, immigration restriction, the KKK, and more, all of which testify to the ongoing power of conservative religious groups in that period. His timeline also excludes developments on the Court, which applied the religion clauses of the First Amendment to the states in the 1940s and then worked quite aggressively to undermine Christian power in the 1960s. If the power of Protestant Christians was already overthrown by the 1920s and 1930s, then what did the 1960s do and why are so many conservative Christians grieved by the events of that decade?Footnote ⁶

The most powerful and sensitive attempt to explain the decline of Christian power emerges out of the work of David A. Hollinger, who in many ways overcomes the limits of Hutchison and Smith by combining elements of both. Like Hutchison, Hollinger sees this decline of Protestant Christian power as in some sense a response to the diversity of American life. Also like Hutchison, Hollinger argues that the cultural transformation was “the product of many agencies.” But in practice Hollinger agrees with Smith in limiting those agencies to two—what he calls the Jewish-led intelligentsia and ecumenical Protestantism. He tells two slightly different stories that bring each of these groups to the fore at different times.Footnote ⁷

In the first narrative, Hollinger has argued that the intellectuals were the primary force responsible for the loss of cultural control. The process was a long one. Going back to the nineteenth century, Hollinger suggests that intellectuals and academics engaged in a program of what he calls “cognitive demystification” with the aim of subjecting the claims of religion to critical scrutiny. This procedure helped destabilize Protestant Christian authority by questioning its intellectual assumptions. Meanwhile, the nation was undergoing a parallel process of “demographic diversification” as new groups not part of the Protestant mainline entered American society and undermined the exclusivist claims of Protestant Christians.Footnote ⁸

Jews, according to Hollinger, were at the forefront of both of these efforts. Following the new immigration of the late nineteenth century, they matriculated into public life after rejecting the traditionalism of Jewish culture (though not necessarily their ethnic Jewish identification). At the same time, they also rejected the nationalist provincialism of American cultural life. Key figures here would be Walter Lippmann, Walter Weyl, Horace Kallen, and others who gathered in the bohemian quarters of various American cities, most especially in New York. Their swelling presence as non-Christian Americans in a largely Christian land challenged the religious privilege that could be found in the nation's customs and made Jews into the foremost agents of demographic diversification.Footnote ⁹

Jews were, in fact, a double embodiment of the more abstract historical processes that Hollinger has identified. Jewish anti-provincialism also led these second- and third-generation Jewish Americans to engage in the project of cognitive demystification, critiquing the unthinking cultural pieties around them. Their marginality inclined them toward a relativistic view of cultural norms that would eventually be expressed in the cultural relativism of Franz Boas and his disciples—many of whom, Hollinger points out, were Jewish—and would strengthen various kinds of cultural pluralism.Footnote ¹⁰

This nascent challenge grew over time. During the period immediately after World War I, in Hollinger's telling, secularist and secularizing Jews secured places of prominence in American society and became demographically overrepresented in a host of modern callings—from academia to business. They were, Hollinger notes, “rich, powerful, and smart” in far greater proportions than their percentage within the wider society. As freethinking Jews rose to positions of prominence, they made common cause with post-Protestants who were also emerging from the provincialism of American Protestant life. These post-Protestants are equally well-known figures: John Dewey, Randolph Bourne, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and others whose lives intersected during and after World War I. Although post-Protestants did not necessarily need Jews to help them move away from their Protestant sensibilities, Hollinger writes that the Jewish cosmopolitan perspective “reinforced the most de-Christianized of the perspectives already current among the Anglo-Protestants.” That cosmopolitan perspective gave shape to an influential intelligentsia that captured academia and elite publishing circles and eventually accomplished, as Hollinger explains in the title of one of his essays, the “De-Christianization of American Public Culture.” This “knowledge-centered secularization,” to use a phrase from his more recent work, is essentially in line with that of Smith, and Smith cites Hollinger on exactly this point.Footnote ¹¹

Yet there has always been a key caveat in Hollinger's claims. Though Jewish intellectuals were at the forefront challenging Protestantism's hold on American culture, they were, he argued, “far from the only agents and referent points in the story of American Protestantism's encounter with diversity and the consequent attraction of Protestantism's leaders to ‘pluralism.’” In fact, as Jews emerged into positions of prominence, they “depended in part on measures of support—small from our perspective today but substantial in their context—offered by established intellectuals of Protestant Anglo-Saxon stock.” Until recently, though, Hollinger had not developed the argument about other, non-Jewish actors. The general impression in his writing was of the commanding position of Jewish and post-Protestant intellectuals who developed a cosmopolitan ideal.Footnote ¹²

Hollinger's newer research has now begun to develop those earlier asides in ways that bring him closer to Hutchison. This is his second narrative. Rather than offering a story of progressive de-Christianization led by nonreligious (or antireligious) critics, Hollinger's newer work puts the focus squarely on the ecumenical Protestant leaders of the mid-twentieth century and their self-interrogation as part of their religious tradition. These ecumenical leaders, he suggests, voluntarily renounced their claims to American society in the name of embracing diversity and tolerance. In the process, they wound up installing those ideals at the center of American cultural life. With this argument, Hollinger seems to be moving away from a story of public religious decline and now offers a narrative of religious transformation and even sublimation.Footnote ¹³

The process, he argues, began in earnest in the early twentieth century. It was only then that ecumenical leaders began to respond to a political and intellectual crisis that had been building for some time. Faced with the demographic diversification of American life, in the 1910s and 1920s Protestant leaders made progressive accommodations to try to appeal to newcomers. By the 1930s they brought Catholics and Jews into national political power through the New Deal coalition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They also welcomed them to cultural influence under the banner of Judeo-Christianity. After World War II and the traumas of fascism, the ecumenical leadership went further by pushing their constituency to accommodate diversity in a variety of ways—advocating for racial integration, gender equality, liberal internationalism, and more. Ecumenical missionaries, some of whom were quite well known, began to bring back news of the world that showed Anglo-American Christianity as but one historically conditioned perspective among many. Missionaries acted from within the tradition to decenter Protestant Christianity. They were, Hollinger suggests, “the closest thing to an Anglo-Protestant equivalent of the Jews who dramatically expanded American public life during the same period.” Their effect was equally profound. Taking up the missionary challenge, ecumenical leaders modified the tradition to offer their parishioners, in Hollinger's words, a “cosmopolitan and rationalist perspective” that was “self-consciously ‘modern.’”Footnote ¹⁴

By the 1940s and 1950s, the ecumenical leadership was exhibiting a powerful capacity for self-questioning and self-interrogation. Their place at the head of churches made them a central vehicle in advancing, in Hollinger's argument, “the secular liberalism that they had embraced.” In fact, given the church's prominence in American public life, Hollinger leaves some doubt as to whether secular liberal goals would have been achieved had Protestant ecumenicals not pushed for them. He ultimately sees a profound effect to ecumenical leaders’ efforts. They “generated a cascade of liberalizing consequences extending well beyond the diminishing domain of the mainstream churches, running through the lives and careers of countless post-Protestant Americans distributed across a wide expanse of secular space.”Footnote ¹⁵

Hollinger has been somewhat reluctant to explain how these two narratives work together. But most recently he has suggested that the intelligentsia and the ecumenical leadership each generated parallel ideas of cosmopolitanism, born out of a growing knowledge about the world that came from different traditions. “The Europe-centered cosmopolitanism of the Jewish intellectuals and the Asia-centered cosmopolitanism of the missionary contingent” formed twin streams, he suggests, that “acted harmoniously and simultaneously” to challenge the Protestant hold on American life. Hollinger's most recent formulations offer a mechanism of cultural transformation that seems less agonistic, more evolutionary, and less abrupt than Smith has suggested and that his own earlier work might have implied.Footnote ¹⁶

The salient points of controversy, then, are two. First, what or who caused the transformation? Smith points to a network of intellectuals who de-Christianized American public life in conjunction with wider structural changes that they exploited. Hutchison points to religious outsiders, Protestant liberalizers, and the emergence of a pluralist ideology without ever specifying the precise mechanics for the transformation. Hollinger argues for the emergence of a cosmopolitan idea driven by a Jewish-led intelligentsia and Protestant ecumenical self-interrogation without definitively assigning priority to either. Second, when did the transformation happen? Smith argues that it had occurred in large measure by the 1930s after the intelligentsia took shape. Hutchison argues that the process took place over a longer stretch of time but culminated in the 1960s. Hollinger argues that the intelligentsia emerged in the first two decades of the twentieth century, that ecumenical self-interrogation began in earnest the 1920s, and that both streams had converged by the middle decades of the twentieth century. It is difficult to square these accounts as they now stand.

Yet there might be a way around the disagreement that leaves much from all the narratives in place. It relies on the concept of the avant-garde. Although the idea of the avant-garde has received a variety of theoretical treatments, at bottom it identifies a loosely organized group of often European critics who saw contemporary society as more or less bankrupt and sought to sketch new, expansive visions of the future. To the extent that they were successful, the values that the avant-garde put forward were later taken up in the wider culture.Footnote ¹⁷

In the United States, the intellectuals identified by Hollinger and Smith were a kind of cultural and cognitive avant-garde, which, not incidentally, is how they saw themselves. The group was, as Hollinger has suggested, disproportionately, though not exclusively, Jewish (of a freethinking variety). The intellectuals developed a critique about the dominant place of American Protestantism within American society and the way that Protestant dominance maintained the stultifying moralism, the intellectual laziness, and the ethnic chauvinism characteristic of American society. Their critique was fully formed by the 1920s, as Smith has suggested, but it did not fully penetrate into culture, politics, or law until the 1960s. When it did so, it required the mainstreaming help of ecumenical Protestants that Hollinger's later work has considered. Both of these—the avant-garde intellectuals and the ecumenical popularizers—were essential to cultural change, though they operated in different ways at different times.Footnote ¹⁸

To understand how this cognitive avant-garde took shape, we have to start not in the United States but in Europe with the freethinking Jews who had long been considered the carriers of cultural modernity. As Yuri Slezkine has argued, Jews had for many years been what he calls “Mercurians”—those governed by the god Mercury who were neither herders nor farmers nor soldiers but people who lived by craft or art or numeracy. With the bourgeois revolution and the rise of capitalism, these Mercurian skills that the Jews possessed became ever more salient in the societies of the modern world. Jews were so adept at making their way in this emergent social form that Jewish people were often seen as coextensive with the forces shaping modernity. Marx, for example, in one of his earliest discussions of capitalism, claimed that understanding the current social structure and its possible alternatives really came down to a “Jewish Question,” by which he meant that Jews represented, in some fundamental sense, the capitalist system of the era.Footnote ¹⁹

The symbolic connection of Jews with modern capitalist culture likewise extended to politics. With the advance of European modernization, assimilated and emancipated Jews became one of the central agents of political liberalization. Their cultural modernity and the fact of their traditional exclusion from public life prompted them to emphasize neutral public spaces in which citizens could meet and confer about matters of public import regardless of ethnic or religious identification. Individual rights and freedom of movement became important concerns. In many cases the emergence of Jews into public life and the embrace of modern, liberal cultural forms were one and the same process. “The universities, ‘free’ professions, salons, coffeehouses, concert halls, and art galleries in Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest,” Slezkine explains, “became so heavily Jewish that liberalism and Jewishness became almost indistinguishable.”Footnote ²⁰

Yet there were also problems that arose as the modernization process occurred. In many cases Jews became identified with those problems. As social structures became more elaborated, less feudal, and more bureaucratized and industrialized, the mechanisms of control within modern societies changed in ways that were difficult to understand. The means by which the individual related to the social whole, the role of authority in that wider society, and the way that societies maintained stability became, suddenly, uncertain. The intellectual historian Thomas L. Haskell speaks of a “recession of causation” that presented itself as a particularly unsettling aspect of modernity. Events seemed to happen without any particular person to blame or anyone in control. If a person lost a job because of an economic downturn, for example, it was hard to know the ultimate cause for his loss. His boss was only responding to the instructions of his boss, who was in turn responding to the realities of customer demand, which was itself driven by the individual situations of consumers who perhaps had also lost their job or had their hours cut. The causal chain extended over the horizon and at such a distance that no one could identify an ultimate cause for the loss of a job other than the abstract notion of a market downturn. There was nothing much to be done other than cast about for hidden forces.Footnote ²¹

To address this gap in knowledge, a whole new set of disciplines, known as the social sciences, began to emerge. Freethinking Jews (like Marx) were at the forefront of the effort. Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, and Georg Simmel (whose parents were ethnic Jews but who had converted to Christianity) joined Marx in theorizing how individuals, societies, and political forms intersected and reinforced one another in the modern world. Among the Founding Fathers of sociology usually taught in an introductory survey course—Marx, Weber, and Durkheim—only Max Weber was a Gentile. And even though there were other, non-Jewish sociologists who also formulated secular visions of society—Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and Ernst Haekel, among them—the high number of Jews is still quite striking. They were so important to the social-scientific enterprise that Friedrich Gundolf, a (Jewish) literary scholar active during the Weimar Republic in Germany, wrote upon attending a sociological congress in Berlin, “Now I know what sociology is. Sociology is a Jewish sect.”Footnote ²²

Yet it was more than just that. The outlook of these new social sciences was distinctly modern and often secularist because, in almost every case, the core of the social-scientific project involved a rejection of the explanatory power and authority of traditional faith. The bourgeois life of the city, the new industrialized forms of capitalist exchange, and the place of the individual in this new social whole could not, social scientists believed, be understood in the old terms. Although early social theorists offered various responses to the problems of modernity, they all agreed that only new, modern forms of knowledge would suffice. And they offered up these new theories to critique waves of resurgent religiosity, which worked against their secularizing impulse, through the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.Footnote ²³

While this transformation was taking place in Europe, a parallel transformation was occurring on the other side of the Atlantic that would, eventually, draw upon social-scientific thought. The United States had long been modern in an economic and, to some extent, a political sense, insofar as it embraced capitalist self-interest and tied that embrace to representative political systems that repudiated the monarchical government of the past. But the American embrace of modern economic and political structures did not, for much of the nineteenth century, entail any broad acceptance of what the intellectual historian Dorothy Ross has called “cognitive modernism,” or the intellectual rejection of the (often religious) ideas of the past. Instead, this period saw the dramatic expansion of American religious adherence—church membership grew throughout the entire nineteenth century—and the continuation of Protestant religious authority in all aspects of American society. These ideas were embedded in American culture through a religious Victorianism that held sway well beyond the actual reign of Queen Victoria. Religious notions were prevalent in American politics, particularly after the Civil War, as religious groups mobilized to impose their moral vision on the nation through the new power of the federal state. Religious conceptions could also be seen in laws and court rulings on the local, the state, and the federal level, which drew upon Protestant ideas about public morality, marriage, race, and sex to police American society, to control choice, and to limit public debate through censorship. The public authority of the Protestant religion, though it did face challenges, was fully intact through much of the nineteenth century. This is what Hutchison calls “the Protestant establishment.”Footnote ²⁴

But, as Hollinger has pointed out, cognitive and demographic changes were under way to make that establishment less secure. Among the most important of the cognitive changes was the development of an American social science that, like its European counterpart and often drawing from it, sought to reimagine the structures of American society. American social science was, at least at first, not quite as Jewish as it was in Europe and not as overtly hostile to American religion. Some of the earliest social scientists were liberal Protestants and followers of the Social Gospel who sought to use the new discipline to push American society into what they considered more desirable religious directions—ameliorating class conflict, maintaining a religious presence in the city, and, less consistently, addressing racial inequality.Footnote ²⁵

This religious impulse within American social science would not to last long. It soon gave way to a more purely modernist impulse that sought to undermine the Christian foundation of the past. One of the earliest American sociologists, Lester Frank Ward, saw social science as a “revolt against that kind of authority which would force upon the people the primitive civilizations of by-gone centuries.” The liberal Christian Albion Small, who founded the American Journal of Sociology in 1895, spoke in the journal's first issue of “alleged ‘Christian sociologists’” and promised that the journal's attitude would be “severely suspicious” toward anyone who used religion to justify his pronouncements. W. E. B. Du Bois, who studied history and sociology at both Harvard and the University of Berlin, used social science to interrogate the white religious subjection of black Americans and to put forward a more supple idea of culture and race that justified black advancement. As Dorothy Ross has put it, by the turn of the century American social scientists were beginning “to express a modernist sense of history as continuous change, a consciousness of time that became increasingly disconnected from all except the present moment.”Footnote ²⁶

So keen was this new modernist sensibility, and so profoundly did it upset established Christian notions, that many Christian leaders began to lament what they perceived to be their loss of influence and the creeping secularism that they feared would become dominant in the future. Washington Gladden, a leader in the Social Gospel movement, decried what he saw as a rapidly widening “schism between Christians and Sociologists” as something that should not have happened. Others spoke, with some dread, of “the settled state of unbelief” and the eventual death of all religious ideas “among our advanced thinkers.” Protestant leaders feared that their religion was losing its intellectual base with the organization of modern disciplines to exclude any overt religious commitment.Footnote ²⁷

Their concern was entirely justified. As the sociologist Mark Chaves has more recently argued, the loss of religious authority outside its institutional space is the sine qua non of secularizing societies. What Protestant leaders instinctively understood and what Chaves later theorized was that secularization did not require the absolute abandonment of religious belief or adherence. It involved, more fundamentally, an abandonment of the public authority and social significance of religion, which is exactly what the new social sciences promised. The creators of American social science rejected any and all religious authority outside a religion's institutional setting. They worked instead toward a new repository of social authority within social science itself. As the social-scientific program expanded, Protestant leaders feared that their own authority would be irrelevant to the wider culture in the near future.Footnote ²⁸

In response, Protestant modernizers turned to social science to reconstruct their own faith, drawing in particular on the emergent field of psychology to reimagine the urgent existential and emotional function that religion served. Because religion was supposed to meet a stable set of human needs, psychologists such as William James, Edward Diller Starbuck, and George Albert Coe maintained that religion emerged in a predictable way across societies. That predictability then affirmed the necessity of religion for all societies across time and space, even if the specific tenets of religion needed to be reconstructed in the modern era.Footnote ²⁹

This psychological perspective also fed into an ongoing modernizing project that liberal Protestants had assumed some time earlier. Going back to the middle of the nineteenth century, Christians of all varieties had had to wrestle with the meaning of their faith in light of contemporary discoveries. Geologists had begun to uncover a past history of the earth that stretched backward through millions of years. Biologists encountered species in the fossil record that no longer seemed to exist, which ran against the notion of God's attending providence. Charles Darwin's 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species put forward a biological explanation for life that seemingly did not require a deity and that clashed at many significant points with the Christian creation narrative. Biblical scholars began to show that the cosmological, social, and political beliefs of the ancient Near East were fully represented in the Christian scriptures. The more biblical scholars worked, the more it became clear that the Bible itself had a social and textual history that was bound to specific times and places. The historical specificity of the Bible made the timelessness of Christian revelation significantly less tenable without some intellectual labor. This flood of scientific and academic knowledge made an increasingly small island on which someone needed God to explain the world and its operations.Footnote ³⁰

In response, some Protestants began to modify their belief. Because theologians had long asserted that an infinite God needed to use metaphor to appear before finite human beings, the historical specificity of Christian revelation or its incompatibility with modern scientific perspectives left many Protestant modernizers only momentarily troubled. That incompatibility, they believed, was merely a function of God's condescension to the limited horizons of human beings at the time at which he spoke. Now that human understanding had changed, the task of theology was to extract the timeless universals from the historical particulars. A person could do that without being overly concerned about points where scientific, cultural, or political understanding had, in the fullness of time, outstripped the perspectives of those who had written the Bible. The obsolete particulars were the accidents of history that did not affect the more timeless core of revelation that remained. The particulars might have changed, modernizers argued, but the universals remained the same as ever.Footnote ³¹

Protestant modernists also began to make their peace with diversity, partly out of necessity. To some extent, that meant making their peace with the American religious scene. There had long been a centrifugal force within American spirituality that produced a bewildering congeries of new religious forms. Unitarians, universalists, ethical culturists, Theosophists, spiritualists, New Thought proponents, Vedantists and other convert Hindus, Buddhists, Quakers of both traditional and Hicksite persuasions, and more—all proliferated in a wildly chaotic religious arena. By the end of the nineteenth century, Protestant missionaries had begun to bring back a changed outlook on foreign peoples, offering a perspective at once deeply sympathetic to other cultures and deeply conflicted about the program of Christian civilization at the heart of the missionary impulse. Other Protestant leaders began to wrestle with an awareness of the world's religions generated by scholars of comparative religion and by events such as the World's Parliament of Religions at the 1893 Columbia Exposition.Footnote ³²

Those challenges grew more acute with the demographic transformation of American society. With the massive immigration of the late nineteenth century, new groups not part of the Protestant mainline entered the United States. Their presence began to undermine the exclusivist claims of Protestant Christians. Catholics in particular became both the largest single denomination in the late nineteenth century and a deeply conservative force. Although there were liberalizing movements within Catholicism, in 1899 Pope Leo XIII squashed much of the liberalizing effort with his encyclical, Testem Benevolentiae, which denounced a variety of liberal ideas—free speech, freedom of religion, and so on—that he grouped under the label “Americanism.” He was not quite correct in seeing these values as universally embraced in the United States. But the sheer number of Catholics in the United States caused problems for Protestant religious dominance, which then furthered the liberalism that the Pope denounced.Footnote ³³

Religious Jews joined the fray as well. Like Catholics, Jews had been in the United States since its earliest years. But the mass migration of European Jews in the latter part of the nineteenth century was, along with that of the African slaves and the Chinese, one of the most significant large-scale influxes of non-Christian groups into the United States prior to 1965. Many religious Jewish leaders moved to adapt Judaism to its new home, and the result—Reform Judaism—was a non-Christian progressivism that both courted and challenged the Protestant elite.Footnote ³⁴

In response, Protestants began to reach out to modernizers within both Catholicism and Judaism, recognizing people they considered allies in the ongoing effort to reconstruct religion. Protestant ecumenicals affirmed the universal brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God. They worked outside the specific confines of one denomination or religious tradition to find a universal religious sensibility that could provide a more authoritative basis for their influence on American society. It was a project of urgent existential reconstruction that, partially, succeeded.Footnote ³⁵

But there were limits to this embrace of diversity that suggested a more important limit to Protestant modernism. What the evangelical moralist Lyman Beecher had called “political atheism” was not the goal. Beecher had used the label in the early nineteenth century as an epithet against his opponents. He argued that some people, even then, advocated a vision of politics and of American public life that acted as if there was no God in heaven, whatever they might privately believe. The assertion that God existed, that God established norms, and that human law was built to enforce those norms, meant, according to Beecher, that American politics, culture, and society needed to recognize God's law. Though most Protestant modernists disagreed with the specifics of Beecher's theology—strongly so—they agreed with him that God provided the ultimate ground for human society. Society, then, needed to protect religion as its most fundamental basis, religious modernists believed, or it would stand to reason that society would begin to fall apart. This rejection of political atheism is precisely why Protestant modernizers were so uncomfortable with the direction of American social science. In seeking to understand how social order was maintained, social scientists conceived of society and of social authority without any regard as to whether or not God existed.Footnote ³⁶

This divide turned out be hugely important. When Protestant modernizers rejected political atheism, their rejection made them resistant to the final and most comprehensive challenge to their religious authority—the cosmopolitan and often politically atheist ideas of the emergent intelligentsia that Hollinger and Smith have discussed.

The challenge began quietly and in small pockets. This is, in Hollinger's argument, where freethinking Jews became important in the American context. It is also where the avant-garde began to fully develop. By the early part of the twentieth century, young thinkers and writers began to gather in the bohemian quarters of American cities. There, they digested and debated the social thought that was then emerging out of the new academic disciplines. Walter Lippmann, for example, turned to Freudian ideas throughout his classic 1913 book A Preface to Politics, in order to show the psychological and social damage of trying to use old beliefs as a guide in the new modern world. Nearly everyone in bohemia took for granted that the new, modern ideas were the only ones worth considering. As Walter Weyl, an economist and one of the founders of New Republic, put it, “America to-day is in a somber, soul-questioning mood. We are in a period of clamor, of bewilderment, of an almost tremulous unrest. We are hastily revising all our social conceptions.”Footnote ³⁷

The interethnic character of this intelligentsia was one of its most potent innovations. Black thinkers and writers such as James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Alain Locke joined freethinking Jews and white post-Protestants in the assault on religious power. Black intellectuals particularly probed the racial dimensions of an Anglo-Protestant establishment that had tacitly, if not explicitly, affirmed segregation. They likewise interrogated the conservatism of the black church. Committed black Protestants joined the cause, though in their own way. Carter G. Woodson, for example, a man seriously sympathetic to Christianity who remained a committed Baptist his entire life, still noted in his History of the Negro Church that conservatives within the black religious tradition had driven out many “intelligent people” through their cultural and intellectual rigidity. That rigidity often emerged from a religious leadership that could seem out of touch, and a critical attitude toward black ministers and even black Christianity would remain common in black intellectual formulations for some time to come.Footnote ³⁸

Together this emergent intelligentsia began to articulate a new cosmopolitan sensibility that could, in Ann Douglas's words, eliminate the “block to modernity” that conservative cultural and religious sensibilities represented. As the intelligentsia began to coalesce, its questioning extended in remarkable directions that directly challenged many prevailing notions. In an attempt to address the exploding population of immigrants, for example, American policymakers had long pursued a forthright strategy of Americanization. The goal was the assimilation of newly immigrated proto-citizens in a way that erased, or at least minimized, their cultural difference from dominant Anglo-Protestant ideals. But the newly forming intelligentsia—black, white, and Jewish—did not share that goal of Americanization and, as part of their wider project of social questioning, began to articulate alternative conceptions of the social whole. Though the precise formulations differed, the new intellectuals embraced a cosmopolitan sensibility and rejected national, ethnic, and religious chauvinism as the beginning of their theorizing. What Horace Kallen called “cultural pluralism,” what Randolph Bourne called “trans-national America,” and what Alain Locke called “race pride”—in all three cases affirmations of cosmopolitan diversity as something to be celebrated and nurtured in order to promote equality—became the intelligentsia's guiding concepts. By the late 1910s and early 1920s, as the intelligentsia began to emerge out of the cultural cocoon of the bohemias in order to assume more secure places in American life, they carried these new perspectives into more influential realms.Footnote ³⁹

Protestant modernizers, working on a parallel, if trailing, track, also began to advance within their own tradition. Though they were not necessarily attracted to the most radical expressions of the intelligentsia, some did recognize the power of this cosmopolitan ideal on a limited basis. They saw the dangers of insisting upon a narrow idea of religious faithfulness to justify their own public authority. When religious traditionalists, now calling themselves fundamentalists, began to insist upon the maintenance of strict orthodoxy within a particular religious denomination, Protestant modernizers rejected their pleas. They sought to open up their faith to a variety of doctrinal expressions. The modernizers’ victory during the fundamentalist–modernist controversies of the 1920s then installed a liberal ethos within a variety of denominations and communicated a broader conception of religious life to the masses.Footnote ⁴⁰

These developments were all important. Together, liberal Protestants, post-Protestants, and freethinking Jews began to work liberal values into wider and wider arenas of American public life. Their alliance was real because they were committed to the normative embrace of diversity, as each understood it. But the limits of that alliance were soon to be tested as the issue of religious authority became clearer.

Nowhere was the problem of authority more important than in law, which became a central site of cultural liberalization starting in the 1920s, and one that Hutchison, Hollinger, and Smith all relatively neglect. Before that time, civil liberties were hardly a central question within American law, though many cosmopolitan intellectuals and activists had tried to push the issue. Anti-Protestant radicals such as D. M. Bennett, Ida C. Craddock, and Emma Goldman had spent decades championing civil liberties such as free speech, freedom of the press, and sexual freedom, largely without success. The Court, unmoved by their arguments, instead spent that time systematically undercutting the rights of ethnic minorities in the South and the West. But beginning with a series of free-speech cases arising out of World War I, the Court began to consider what the Constitution required in order to protect the rights of individual citizens. Whole new categories of rights began to emerge—free-speech rights, substantive due-process rights, the right to privacy, and others—as new forms of constitutional modernism came into being. This new concern for civil liberties was, at its most basic, the appropriation of the cosmopolitan ideal into the legal realm. It represented a new appreciation of difference and individuality rather than the usual attention to conformity within the social whole.Footnote ⁴¹

It was at this point that the power of social scientists and of the avant-garde became fully manifest. Freethinking Jewish lawyers and judges such as Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, and Benjamin Cardozo allied with liberal Protestants and post-Protestants such as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. They drew upon a new mode of legal interpretation, known as sociological jurisprudence, that sought to understand the actual social effects of law as a guide for judging rather than the formalist process of following a stable set of rules. The goal was twofold: first, to use social science in order to understand the changing social structure, and second, to tailor decisions to achieve desirable outcomes within the new social structure. It was that second goal that often gave rise to novel rights claims and that led to constitutional modernism. As Brandeis said flatly in 1890, in an article written with his law partner Samuel D. Warren where he first divined a right to privacy in the US Constitution, “Political, social, and economic changes entail the recognition of new rights.”Footnote ⁴²

As jurists turned to sociological jurisprudence, they used the authority of science to reconstruct American law. In the process, they began to extend their social inquiry deeper into American religious life. Though the Court began to take up this social-science orientation in the 1920s, the revolution only began to affect religion cases by the late 1930s and early 1940s. Liberals were aided in their program by a surprising source. Protestant separatists—Jehovah's Witnesses, Anabaptists, and others—abetted changes within the Court by bringing cases that challenged the legal mechanisms of control that had sustained the Protestant establishment. Their goal was to maximize their own religious freedom through the separation of church and state, and they used basic ideas within the judicial tradition for their own ends.Footnote ⁴³

When Protestant separatists began to mount cases, liberals on the Court eagerly accepted them. Liberals had actually asked for the cases. The Court promised in a 1938 case, United States v. Carolene Products Co., “a more searching judicial inquiry” into laws that discriminated against religious, national, and racial minorities. Its stated goal was simply the elimination of “prejudice.” But as the cases kept coming the Court began to move further than it might have originally intended, rejecting by implication the authority of Protestant Christianity or any particular religion in law. In 1940, for example, in the first case to apply the free-exercise clause of the First Amendment to the states, liberals on the Court began to use the new jurisprudence to reject religious power and to encourage massive diversity.Footnote ⁴⁴

The case concerned a Connecticut law that required Jehovah's Witnesses and others to get a license from a county agent in order to solicit. The liberals on the Court struck down the law. En route to their decision, they used the doctrine of religious freedom to articulate an explicit ideal of cultural pluralism that went far beyond the mere elimination of prejudice. The reason for its decision, the Court said, was that it was not the business of the state to achieve religious conformity through the regulation of religious practice and expression. The state ought instead to create law so that “many types of life, character, opinion and belief can develop unmolested and unobstructed.” Only the normative commitment to pluralism, the Court now asserted, would be worthy of the democracy of the United States.Footnote ⁴⁵

In the aftermath of World War II, that perspective grew. The Court became one of the central conduits to challenge religious authority and to expand liberal freedoms. In 1947, in Everson v. Board of Education, the Court applied the establishment clause to the states for the first time and began to constitutionally require the separation of church and state. Hugo Black, a nominal Baptist who nevertheless hewed to the traditional Baptist notion of church–state separatism, wrote the majority opinion. He was devoted to the idea of a wall of separation, he later told his wife, because “when one religion gets predominance, they immediately try to suppress the others.” This was exactly the embrace of public religious neutrality that European Jewish intellectuals had been urging since the middle of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁶

Yet there were many religious modernists who resisted the Court's drift toward church–state separatism. John Courtney Murray, a Catholic liberalizer prominent in the 1940s and 1950s, led a group of both Catholics and non-Catholics in protest against what he called the “legal victory for secularism” entailed in the Court's new jurisprudence. Some Protestants also began to react, publishing books with titles like Christianity and the Crisis of Secularism or The Modern Rival of the Christian Faith: An Analysis of Secularism. Liberal Protestants had supported the opening up of categories of faith to provide a greater freedom of belief, but because many still believed that religious authority was essential to the perpetuation of any society, the secularizing and liberalizing move of the Court put them off. As Dwight D. Eisenhower famously put it, “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is. With us of course it is the Judo-Christian [sic] concept.” Although this statement was much mocked in some quarters as the perfect expression of the vacuousness of liberal Christianity, it also precisely articulated why many liberal Protestants were reluctant to take the final step toward political atheism.Footnote ⁴⁷

They were pulled in that direction anyhow. Rather than waiting around for Protestants modernists to catch up, post-Protestant and Jewish intellectuals began to go even farther in seeking to diffuse a cosmopolitan and secularist perspective throughout American society. They rejected any lingering public obeisance to private religious belief. Freethinking Jews had by this point ascended to the highest ranks of American intellectual life, in far greater proportion than their relatively minuscule percentage of the population. To list the many Jewish intellectuals of the era is simply to list many of the major intellectuals, full stop. Such figures included Nathan Glazer, Hannah Arendt, Daniel Bell, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Isaac Rosenfeld, Meyer Shapiro, Walter Kaufmann, and Lionel Trilling. Post-Protestant luminaries such as Dwight Macdonald, George Plimpton, and C. Wright Mills joined them. Publishing in magazines like Commentary (founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945), Dissent, The Nation, Partisan Review, and, in time, the New York Review of Books, the postwar Jewish-led intelligentsia pushed, often from the perspective of the anti-Stalinist left, in support of black civil rights, decolonization abroad, free expression in publishing and movies, and other liberalizing causes. Much of their commentary either explicitly rejected religious authority as an impediment to the liberalizing causes they espoused or simply assumed the irrelevance of religious ideals to these causes.Footnote ⁴⁸

Meanwhile, religiously liberal, post-Protestant, and Jewish justices began to go farther as well, elaborating their opposition to the quasi-established place of Christianity in public life. In doing so, they built out the declared but not yet fully realized wall of separation between church and state. Although the process proceeded in fits and starts, it culminated in the 1960s. During that tumultuous decade, the Court struck down state laws that required public officials to believe in God and a future state of rewards and punishments. It struck down prayer and Bible-reading in schools, both practices that had dated back to the beginning of public schooling in the United States. It allowed a person's sincerely held but not necessarily religious belief in the immorality of war to be sufficient for exemption from the draft. It overturned the many state laws that forbade the sale of contraceptives and, not incidentally, it declared for the first time that the right to privacy was part of fundamental law. It struck down antimiscegenation laws, which were also often justified by religious considerations. And it struck down censorship and obscenity laws that were designed to uphold a public morality. The guiding principle in all these decisions was exactly the concern for civil liberties, the indifference to established moral and religious authority, and the normative preference for pluralism and heterogeneity that were part and parcel of the secularizing and cosmopolitan perspective pushed by many intellectuals since the 1910s and twenties.Footnote ⁴⁹

Faced with the direction of the Court and of American intellectual life, some Protestant modernizers began to accede to the secularist agenda and accepted the loss of authority that the agenda entailed. Though they had spent much of the past half-century disturbed by very notion of public secularity, they found themselves moved by the avant-garde intellectuals into more radical directions over time. To some extent, this was a natural function of the theological modernism that ecumenicals upheld. As the late nineteenth-century religious modernist Theodore Munger put it, ecumenical religion “allies itself with the thought of the present age.” That was its cardinal characteristic. Because religious modernists turned to the perspectives of non-Protestants and even nonreligious outsiders to feed their ecumenical project, they frequently found themselves responding to the intellectual currents that others put in motion.Footnote ⁵⁰

By the 1960s, as much as they resisted the arguments of secularists up until that point, ecumenicals were pulled in the secularizing direction as they sought to make their theology responsive to the age. Their desire for relevance pulled them so far that they eventually jettisoned their desire for a Christian America. The death-of-God movement, the increasing disdain of ecumenicals for defending supernatural Christianity, the embrace of situational ethics rather than evangelical moralism, and the practical commitment to social liberation that supported the movement politics of the 1960s—all these developments aligned ecumenicals with the secularizing cosmopolitan intellectuals who had long put forward new visions of American life. As ecumenical leaders spoke out from their positions of leadership—in public statements, denominational periodicals, and sermons—they diffused the cosmopolitan perspective to their congregants and reinforced many of the most radical movements of the 1960s.Footnote ⁵¹

And yet that does not make ecumenicals responsible for the secularizing moment of the 1960s, nor does it make this moment a cultural consequence of Protestantism. Protestant ecumenicals were integral to the normative embrace of diversity and the de-Christianization of American public life among their parishioners. But the ideals that they championed emerged quite often from opponents of any public Christian religious authority. These ideas originated in the most tangible way in post-Christian European and often Jewish intellectuals’ desire for neutral public spaces and in the American bohemians’ embrace of cosmopolitan secularity. To the extent that the cosmopolitan ideal was embraced by the Protestant ecumenical tradition, it was often paired with an assertion of the importance of religion in general for American society that ecumenicals only abandoned in the 1960s. When the ecumenical leadership fully signed on to the cosmopolitan project, the triumph of political atheism among the intellectual, educational, and legal classes of American society involved the rejection of religious authority in American public life as a matter of cultural, political, and legal policy.

To put it still another way, the mainstreaming of avant-garde ideas by the mid-twentieth-century ecumenicals generated what the post-Protestant philosopher John Rawls called an “overlapping consensus” that sustained public secularism. In Rawls's conception, various people within a liberal regime will support a specific law or arrangement for different reasons, often having to do with their own religious tradition or worldview. In the mid-century United States, avant-garde intellectuals, religious modernizers, and Protestant separatists all supported a project of secularization so that each could, in their own way, pursue their individual ends. Jehovah's Witnesses, though they did not share the intellectuals’ cosmopolitan ideal, still used the Court's embrace of that ideal to advance a separation of church and state and to install political atheism into American public life. In the process they accepted another idea that Rawls would call “public reason.” What he meant is that in a liberal polity, citizens could have whatever private reasons they wished for supporting a policy. But in making their case for that policy, they had to use argumentation that would be recognized by those not within their particular tradition or worldview. The rationale had to be publicly available, which meant for religious people that it often had to be politically atheistic. Their own religious reasons for supporting a policy had to remain privatized. To Jehovah's Witnesses, to ecumenical Protestants, and to other religious folk who signed on to the mid-century secularist project, the trade-off was worth it because the emergence of a secular regime often involved the expansion of liberal freedom that occurred simultaneously with the withdrawal of Protestant power.Footnote ⁵²

Unfortunately, it was not a universally accepted consensus. This focus on the avant-garde, secularist intelligentsia and the alternative notion of authority that they put forward also helps explain what happened after that decade. Simply put, the avant-garde continued along, again led by the many Jews and post-Protestants in leadership positions within the feminist movement, the free-speech movement, and the antiwar movement. To the extent that ecumenical Protestant leaders successfully diffused these cosmopolitan and secularist perspectives throughout their congregations, they further risked losing hold of their children. Many politically active young adults on the left concluded that churches were, in Hollinger's words, “too moderate and clunky in the task of ‘liberating the captives.’” Other, conservative young adults, though they tended to be much fewer in number, decided that the liberal churches no longer stood for historical Christianity and migrated into conservative denominations. After the 1960s, the Protestant mainline went into demographic free fall, the result of the low ecumenical birthrate and the loss of their children for various other organizations or for no religious affiliation at all. Faced with this vacuum of religious power, conservative Protestants picked up the banner of Christian America, resisted the affirmations of diversity that ecumenicists and secularist intellectuals both championed, and eventually became the backbone of the Republican Party.Footnote ⁵³

Today, the secular revolution is under attack. Christian conservatives have continued to affirm the normative authority of Christianity (or sometimes Judeo-Christianity) in American public life. Within Republican Party politics, they have successfully undermined the mid-century overlapping consensus and rejected the rule of public reason. But they have not yet been able to achieve the power of the Protestant establishment at its apex. Until the transformation of the 1960s, Protestants were able to take their power for granted in many ways, or at least able to hold off those who objected to their power. But after the cultural transformation of the 1960s, the new religious right had to claim Christian prerogatives and to assert their authority (or their privilege) in a way the mainline never had to do. The culture wars of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were partly an attempt to reclaim the now contested place of traditional moral ideals in American life, but they never quite panned out as their conservative proponents had wished. The place of conservative religious ideals has become ever more marginal in the arenas of cultural production—film, literature, the arts, the university, and so on—and conservative Christians have found themselves on the intellectual defensive as backward proponents of old and outmoded notions.Footnote ⁵⁴

There is also a new struggle within the academy. Post-structuralist and postcolonial critics in anthropology and religious studies—Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, and Tracy Fessenden, for example—have argued that secularism is aligned with Western imperialism, or Protestantism, or state-sanctioned antireligiousness, and that it has often resulted in the aggravation of religious tension rather than the embrace of difference and tolerance. Some religious intellectuals complain that religious considerations are inadmissible in much contemporary discussion even where they are relevant. The legal scholar Stephen L. Carter has argued that the embrace of political atheism and of public secularism trivializes faith by making religious people act as though their own religious beliefs have no bearing on their political life. The evangelical historian George Marsden has suggested that secular, liberal elites failed after the 1950s and paved the way for a religious revival in the public sphere that he now applauds. Catholic critics such as Charles Taylor depict secularism not as a political liberation but as a cultural state in which life is “empty, flat, devoid of higher purpose,” and that yields “a victory for darkness.” Together, these efforts undermine the liberal assumptions of mid-twentieth-century secularism and look forward to their demise.Footnote ⁵⁵

It is perhaps important to pause over the loss and the limits that public secularism imposes on some ardent people of faith. For a person who feels that his or her religious ideals cannot be privatized without psychic violence, the regime can be onerous indeed. And when critics such as Mahmood and Fessenden argue that modern political liberalism involves the management of difference rather than the acceptance of diversity in its fullest form—since that acceptance would involve the admission of private religious beliefs into public debate—they have a point.Footnote ⁵⁶

But it is perhaps equally important to note how American society reached this stage, and for that reason it is that it is important to be clear about how and when the secularization process took place. The intellectuals who rejected the public authority of religion at the turn of the last century were advocating new forms of social solidarity and social belonging that they sought to bring about. Their project emerged out of a particular context of religious oppression. The privatization of religion that they advocated was a response to that oppression and also its solution. The expansion of civil liberties, the embrace of cosmopolitan pluralism, and the protection of individual privacy went hand in hand with a rejection of even the mildest forms of religious privilege and of any particular religious authority in public life. Over time the cosmopolitan intellectuals gained allies—many of whom were religious with their own concerns—who eventually saw the power and rightness of the cosmopolitan formulations. They adopted a posture of political atheism in the name of justice and of public peace.

Given the political conflict of the present and the way that religion has riven contemporary American culture and politics, if this is the management of difference rather than its fullest acceptance then maybe American society could use some more management. But that, perhaps, grants too much. Looking back over the past fifty years of cultural struggle—a time in which conservative Christian partisans have sought to maintain and maximize their power—the secular revolution of the mid-twentieth century seems to me not like a war on religion or like a ruse to manage rather than embrace difference. It looks rather more like a political accomplishment and, in keeping with the vanguardism of its original proponents, like a still-viable program for the future.